Shed to Shop...

Some images documenting the transformation from Billy O summer house to awesome illustration shop!

Sign i made to ask people, nicely, to donate something towards the tombola :) 

Just a small section of the awesome stock we began to organise!

SHED! Before stock...looking good!

Look At Us EVALUATION

Task:
-to work as a team and collaboratively come up with, and present, an idea/concept to design the illustration shed which will serve as the illustration shop during the summer show.
-individually to contribute to the construction, design and running of the illustration shop.

Team:
-Me, Micah, Georgina, Suzanne, Ellen, Leah and Manny.

As a starting point, we had a team meeting to brainstorm themes that would guide our plans. We soon settled on a beach hut design which we thought would reflect the feel of the summer show this year. Once we decided on the theme we narrowed down what research needed to be done. To prevent all of us from looking at the same thing, I suggested that we separate the different elements of our design task so we could concentrate our efforts on one thing and feedback to each other in a few days. I looked at wooden chests which could be used both as seating and a storage solution. I started with larger, more commercial places, such as Argos and Tesco but the prices were a bit too high so I chose to look in second hand shops and reclaimed furniture stores which was a bit more productive; as a team we met in town to see what was available from these types of shops and get a realistic price estimate.
To make it easier to collate the information we had gathered I created a blog. I invited everybody as an author so that we could all contribute equally towards it. A lot of our research was done online so I thought a blog would be a quick and easy way to get all of our findings in one place. The ease of sharing information meant we could all help each other out if somebody wasn't having much luck locating something specific and people could give suggestions/feedback.
BLOG LINK:  http://illustrators-assemble.blogspot.co.uk
Having all of the images in one place also made it easier to gather them all together to be put into our powerpoint presentation. Micah, being the pro she is, put most of the slideshow together and we had a lot of images on it but I thought it would be a good idea to have a more holistic visual representation of our imagined shed so i drew this...

Towards the construction and running of the shop:
I signed up to help paint the shed which 5 of us did from 9 until 4 and was really fun! I also helped the next day to do the stock take for the shop, using a system of many stickers to organise everybody's work so that it would be easier when the shop is running to co-ordinate stock and organise money. I have also signed up for one of the 3 hour slots to work in the shop during the summer show and I will happily help out if there is an empty slot nearer the time.

Portfolio

To represent my current illustrative practice i chose 9 very different pieces of work to include in my mini portfolio. I chose to include some pieces from my project work, such as editorials and resin models, but also examples of my personal work. I have chosen a range of illustrations based on whether i was happy with the outcome and what style i wanted my portfolio to reflect. There is a mixture of hand-drawn, digital work, 3D and painting which hopefully shows development and diversity of my illustrative style. I was afraid that using examples of too many different things would make my portfolio looked quite disjointed but I think that there is a consistency in style, colour and application of line-work which is reflected in the different materials and processes i have used to create these images.
When physically putting my portfolio together i tried to disperse the images with more saturated colour in between the vignette illustrations which i had more of. The colours are quite consistent within my different works which also helped to pull it all together and i am happy that my portfolio successfully shows how diverse i can be and also how i have progressed over the last 2 years.

More Cargo development

I wanted to make my cargo site as personal and individual as i could within the parameters given so i tried to replace the navigational text on the home page with my own images.

Had to change the wrap and overflow to make the images fit. 

This was in the 'help' page and was quite simple to follow, i just had to re-write it myself with different variables. 

I found out what coding i needed and managed to get the images on there with relatively little hassle (!) but it seems that the icons do not actually work as links to the pages they are set to. I know this can be fixed with the CSS inspector but i just can't find the right bit so for now i have left it until i can find out how to do it properly.

Looks good i think but needs a bit of work to make the images active links.